Hello world!

Snoopers Rock Sunrise; Kelli Lewis-Sutherland

This is the inaugural post of the Tennessee Landforms Blog. I'll be using this medium (among others) to relay relevant news regarding the website, its updates, and featured content.

If you don't know me, my name is Chuck Sutherland. I have taken over (will be taking over, depending on your perspective) Tennessee Landforms from Tom Dunigan. Tom has other things going on right now which are more important than his well loved website. We had spoken several years ago about when this moment would come and how he wanted to handle it. He has passed the backend data of his old website to me at this point (March of 2024), and I've spent the last month or so building out an ESRI Hub Site using Tennessee Tech University's (TTU) organization subdomain. I teach Theory of GIS I and Theory of GIS II at TTU, and students are actively involved in the development of the datasets and website.

As I build out the new website, the dataset is also changing. Here are some of the changes that I have made so far.

Tennessee Landforms Primary Dataset

The Tennessee Landforms primary dataset has traditionally been arches, balds, lakes, other, peaks, rocks, and waterfalls. At some point around 2013, sinkholes greater than 100' in depth were added. Because I have long used Tennessee Landforms to find interesting and beautiful things to photograph, I have added two new data types (classes) of landforms to the dataset.

Overlooks
Here we are looking for clear views from places (natural or manmade) where one has at least 100' of positive relief from the surrounding area. This leaves a lot of opportunities in East Tennessee to load the dataset down with points. So we are also asking for the location to be a manicured site, like a pull off, a named overlook, or some other similarly cultivated site.

Springs
There are lots of photogenic springs in my part of Tennessee (the Upper Cumberland), and it seems like a wasted opportunity to not be taking advantage of this data class. However, at a glance, the GNIS dataset shows more than 1,000 springs in Tennessee. Do we want to add 1,000 points to the Tennessee Landform dataset? Probably not. So I am asking for features with 1) noteworthy discharge and 2) have photogenic qualities. We are not interested in a rock wall that is dripping, in other words.

Changes on the horizon the Tennessee Landforms Primary Dataset include removing the "other" type. Since some of the others were overlooks, those have been migrated to that data classification. The others which remain are meteor impacts, and unique rock outcrops, both of which I feel would be just fine being included in the "rock" data type.

Tennessee Landforms Secondary Datasets

In the older version of Tennessee Landforms one can dig around and find all kinds of interesting secondary datasets that Tom put together. I've called those out, and made them easier to locate. AT Shelters, Big South Fork landforms, county high points, Great Smoky Mountains landforms, and (fire) towers are some of the original secondary datasets. I am adding caves (coarse data, no point data will ever be provided), cliffs (a student project), and comb graves (a long time pet project of mine). It is likely that there will be more secondary datasets into the future.

A few words about Big South Fork landforms, and Great Smoky Mountains landforms. They were both useful in their time as there used to not be Kentucky Landforms, or North Carolina Landforms, and those datasets cross state boundaries. Since we have wonderful point level data now from each of those respective landform websites, I don't find it as useful as it once was, so I am freezing those datasets at this point. They will continue to be on the website as a historic resource, but they will not continue to grow in the same way that the rest of Tennessee Landforms will.

Data Types

One of the most wonderful things on the original TNLandforms website was the availability of the same data in so many different formats. I wanted to capture that to the best of my ability, and possibly expand on it using some of the GIS formats that I am familiar with. I am proud to say that the primary dataset will be available in CSV, GeoJSON, GPX, and KML. Further, one can now easily grab any subset, or the entire primary dataset as any of those file types. The secondary datasets will be available in varying degrees based on what I was able to easily produce.

Submitting New Landforms

With so many wonderful data collection tools out there (Survey123, Google Forms...) I wanted to leverage this power to do more detailed data collection. To this end, I've developed a Google Form to accept new Tennessee Landform submissions. This takes advantage of quality control (points outside of Tennessee will be more difficult to submit, if not impossible), data classes (it uses a dropdown for type of landform), and better attribution (dimensions, height, name, email, photo URL, photo credit, date...).

Dashboards!

Explore the data quickly using any of the several dashboards that I've created.

Tennessee Landforms Mobile

This is a project that is underway currently. Hopefully in the near future we will have an announcement to make.

Closing Words

I hope that the new Tennessee Landforms will be just as useful, if not more useful to you in the future. It's a wonderful community driven website, and it cannot be successful without your help. Please bookmark the new website, currently at TNLandforms.com and give it a look.